Fatalism in Four Colors by Greenstorm
Fatalism in Four Colors By Volthiacamis -=Black=- Fatalism. It's a useful tool in a place like Tomin Kora. If you're smart here the chance of sudden death can be pretty low in a relative sense. Once you accept that this is one of Maza's favorite hunting grounds you relax into the fatalism, you can ride the shih and it's easier to avoid those nervous screw-ups that leave so many steaming corpses in the street. This bubble on a dead planet that's never quite light and never quite dark is my own hunting ground, too. I'm not here often, but sometimes the stupid and the desperate run to ground in Hell, thinking somehow they won't be followed. Sometimes they try to make deals with the devil himself, I guess. It makes it easier for me to scoop them up in most cases, though not safer. Tomin Kora and safer, no. Don't think for a moment that I've ever liked the place the way I like music, or good food, or a well-done sketch, even before the things that happened there. It has a sort of rhythm of its own, though, and when you have trouble admitting to your masochistic side you can go get it satisfied free and easy. The closest I've ever been able to come to describing the feel is to pop in some Nall-era Odarite or modern Mekke music, that odd completely off-the wall echoing stuff with despair that just won't give in to either hope of grief and die. Masochism. The anti-shih. Me, I lean more the other way. I'm part of a masochistic kind of race though. Full out one way or the other with no middle ground, that's no way to live. That way burns the soul right out of you. I've met a lot of interrogators. They're pretty hard-core; the stuff they can do is unbelievable. I used to hate them back when I was trying to fit into Antimone society, back when they were simply legends of pre-Kretonian days passed on by my family. I've met enough to know they they impress me. I followed one around once after enough times through the meat grinder, followed him until he taught me some basic self-defense against the kind. In return I drew him, did full length bas-reliefs of him, kept goddamned twelfth century Terran music playing for him. I must have turned out fifteen sketches a day. I think it amused him. I was pretty young back then. It was nearly the most frightening thing I've ever been through, proof I guess that everyone is masochistic somewhere. The physical mindskills, sure, I can keep a target as immobilised as well as anyone, and when I'm back with her I can tickle her from across the room. Tickle her or 'kiss' her or trace a touch up her thigh... I love doing that. I'm not so good at the actual mind-stuff, to put it lightly, though. I'm not so good at the skills of either the Nall slaves with their pain nor the ones locked away on Vollista with their healing and their mindtalk. It's something I need to fix, because it was the only way I heard her scream. -=Red=- Compulsion. When we first met, the week after we first met, we cut our thumbs open and pressed them together. Everyone needs ritual, I guess, and maybe that ritual did have a little magic in it. Lin knows the bond has never let up. Our blood was the same color then, hers and mine, a magenta shade that has maybe a trace of mauve, an undertone of fuschia. Blood color. Maza knows I'm familiar enough with my own blood by now, with it everywhere slippery and hot at the worst of times. This is why when I hit the alleyway I got shivers - it was fresh, the color of my blood and of hers, and then oh, Lady, it was hers. It was her. You never in your worst dreams expect to be walking along minding your business and then see, and hear, and feel the love of your life screaming in some dark dirty alleyway not more than twenty feet from you but around some trashcans and behind the corner when the street is slippery and your shoes aren't holding and your legs are weak so when you do everything goes slow, your heart stops and there's this taste in your mouth, all bitter metal and blood and crazy because face it, dear, it's crazy to go chasing down an alleyway on Tomin Kora and you see these humans, these humans are touching her, they're touching her and all that beautiful skin and her hair is wet, it's wet with her blood that could be mine and you don't even stop to worry about who they work for or whether they can kill you or whether oh, Maza, oh, Lin, oh, Nalia, oh, Volir, or whether she's already dead... This is one of the few times no soundtrack slips through my skull. Just a heartbeat, as loud and clear and any drum. Drums are all generic, in the end. I've never been so crazy-mad in my life, never so frightened, never so anything. Everything snaps alive and I'm only glad I remember to go for my gun somehow. I'm not really a killer and I've never been, although I wish that for this one time in my life that I'd been doing it all my life, been killing everyone I saw, then I would be able to wade in and just smash them up, break their faces and break their bones and tear the flesh from them with my teeth. They weren't Cabrerra, which means I'm still alive after the fact; just some street-corner thugs out for a good time who got more than they reckoned they would. Like I said, I'm not a killer, but... I forget my aura that time, forget to keep it quiet and locked like some crawling beast beneath my skin. It's funny in the way that tiny details are funny when you absolutely can't bear to think of anything else because her pulse is so faint and there is no hospital on Tomin Kora, it's funny because the light on my skin was the same color as their blood. -=White=- Constraint. Human hospitals are terrible things. There's no beauty in them, no livability, no sense of shih. Sure, there's a purity of line and color there, but you wouldn't want to live in one. Living in one seems to be exactly what I'm doing. Joining is the closest you can come to telling someone you'll stick around. It's a way of letting her know it'll be ten years before she can keep the bed at a comfortable temperature and not hot with too many covers the way you like it, ten years before you stop arguing about that extra pillow at night and ten years before you need to cook your own breakfast. At least, it's the closest you can come to meaning it. We've been Joined twelve years now, ten and two into the second round. A lover, that's something with a real sense of shih. Not only the sex itself, not only that prickly rush of an adrenaline dance the night before but also that long sweaty press of tangled skin after and washing bedsheets that smell like lust and sweat. All that's pure shih, especially after thinking for a terrifying few days that you'll never have those things again. I wouldn't be in a human hospital for any lover, of course. I wouldn't go down an alley on Tomin Kora after two humans who weigh at least twice as me for any lover either. Just for her, for the ultimate in shih, for my Joined, for The Shih in caps, for the one person who can transform even four white straight walls into a temple I can't leave. She's all curves and hollows and shallow breaths and more beautiful than you could believe even with the bandages on her head and the stitches across her cheek. She's created by Lin's own paintbrush, at home wherever she is. I just wish home was anywhere but here. She holds court in the mornings. All her friends and family come through, you can't believe how many friends she has and how many people say they're related and bring fruit, they bring her flowers and news and smiles. I draw them, or pretend to; mostly I draw her. I draw her to capture her spirit like I tried to do back when we touched together two bloody thumbs. I draw her because I love her and I want so badly to keep her forever, I draw her because she is irrevocably in these moments mine. My pen catches them all, her laughing, her smiling, her tears. The music is always right, so right she doesn't notice it, 28th century Terran, modern Vollistan, 24th century Castori, even sometimes the old pre-sundering Mystic stuff that's so deceptively simple and just on the edge of being completely atonal. It was the Mystic stuff that got me into the rest back in school. I don't like Mystics and when you study music history at a Timonae university it only goes back so far before- So I branched out into 'alien' music, like Castori and Terran and, ironically, Vollistan. I always pretend that I'm trying to make the perfect sketch of her, to capture those elegant lines, but I'll tell you a secret: I'm not. I did once and I tore it up. It'll never come again. Hospitals really do force introspection on you, introspection and the abuse of ream upon ream of paper. I'm no more of a writer than everyone is when they think people can't see, but already I'm going on about her forever. A month's worth of recovery time and we're out, taking it slow like the doctors say. I hope the month goes quick, because I'm driving myself crazy. -=Green=- Necessity. I've always been proud of my ability to focus. It's not all that common on Antimone, although admittedly neither are my kind. I focused on academia back when I thought it would be my life, and I suppose even after I met her, ever since I met her I've been searching pretty singlemindedly for a song. For our song, for something with perfect shih. Even with my focus I snuck into art classes to get in on the supplies. Have you ever priced marble blocks or really good quality paper? I focused on the target when things shifted and generally brought that target in, as dangerous as it was sometimes. I always ended up more-or-less in one piece. The world narrows and there's just this one person, and the crowd is a blur that you move around and through and use as a shield. It's sort of like falling in love is, I guess. Focus on someone. Now we focus together, the Shih and I. First there's the focus on the leaves, on the drying mud and the heavy steam in this hot forest after the rain. Then we find a fallen leaf, green still and brushed from the bush by- --yes, there's the footprint, she sees it too. Two paths, and we spread, quiet through the bush, I'm far quieter than her even after training her as well as I can, and- ----movement, a flash in the very corner of the eye, and it's prey. Vollistans aren't supposed to have these instincts but there it is, the pounding adrenaline and the crawl of an aura wanting to escape my skin, a dry mouth and heightened senses. Just as much like falling in love as ever. I slow way down, eyes scanning- -------it's a small gun as these things go, low and slender, and it comes into my hands without thought. There she is, her own weapon heavy and clumsy still in her grasp. She's aiming well, following the movement, and I follow watching the close leaves sweep past my vision in a blur until- BANG, that's the supposed onomatopaea for a gunshot. She gets a clean kill this time and it's over; I don't need to finish anything with my better aim or with my newly quicker compassion. -=Afterimage=- Time passes quickly out here and the sun is nearly kissing the horizon. We make camp with practised coordination; this is strange to me still, in the months after her injury. She is laughing as she slits the throat, bleeds the beast which she has killed, skins it competently with hands that hold no shake of reaction from the hunt and begins to prepare it to eat, to consume this thing that was just alive, over my fire. I was afraid to touch it the first time, let alone eat this creature whose name I don't know, but she can convince me to do anything. After that day, I think I can convince her to do the same. That interrogator I knew when I was young said that we're all raw blocks to be sculpted by chance and by people stronger than us. The older I get the more I believe that, the more my cultural trappings sink in past skin deep and the more I catch flashes of myself as a clay figure turning beneath the Lady's expert hands. It's no good to fight it. Whatever purpose she's turning me to is her own, and I can only feel the scrape and pressure of the tools used to shape me. Like I said, The Shih and I were neither of us killers. Sometimes, after dinner when we curl up together in the tent and I tickle her without touching her and she snuggles against me like some sleepy embodiment of Lin herself, the Lady lets me think that we still aren't. Summer 2002, I think. A Volthiacamis story. Category:OtherSpace Stories